Websites that post user photos and personal information are gaining enormous popularity. At the corporate level, similar network servers can also include user profiling and personal sites. The user profiling feature allows users to self profile and provides a photo so other users can identify the self-profiled user when people searching or using social computing applications. In one implementation, the photo field is a URL (uniform resource locator) field that required users to provide well formed and accessible URLs. Oftentimes, a user will unknowingly provide a URL that points to locations/files which are only accessible by that user. This means that when another user visits the user profile that user is not able to view the photo.
One limited solution built a custom photo picker that copied the photo from the given URL and placed the photo on a file share accessible to everyone, and then configured the profile to use the copy, thereby creating a form of centralized photo storage. Another limited solution stored the photo on the personal site which reintroduced the inaccessibility problem. Two additional limitations included the lack of support for connecting to a cardkey/security badge system to allow users to use previously captured photos, and the ability to capture and provide photo usage consent. Capturing photo consent is a major legal concern when deciding to use the user photos in other collaboration applications like such as in personal information manager applications, communications programs, and the like.